SGU Episode 1014

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SGU Episode 1014
December 14th 2024
"Protecting livestock safety with proper gear in the poultry industry."
SGU 1013                      SGU 1015
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn."
attributed to Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac, 1755)
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, December 11^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, folks.

S: So guys, this is the last regular SGU episode we will be recording for the year.

E: For the year. OK, good.

S: We're at the end of the year. Next week we're using the episode we recorded in DC last weekend and then the week after that will be the year in Review show. Speaking of which, all of our listeners out there, we need you to send us at info@theskepticsguide.org. Every year we do this vote for your favorite episode, your favorite moment, favorite quote, favorite guest, Science News item of the year and the skeptical Hero of the year, skeptical Jackass of the year and just anything else. Any other feedback you want to give us. Anything you want us to talk about in the year end review show. It's always fun.

E: A lot to review.

S: Yeah, there always is. And Ian, Ian always joins us for that episode.

E: That's right. The man, the myth, the legend.

S: The man, the myth, the watermelon. Do you guys have a good time in DC?

C: Great time in DC.

E: Oh yeah.

B: Beautiful.

E: Yeah, it was really good.

S: Yeah, I lived there for six years. It's a beautiful city. I always enjoy going back. My one regret is that we didn't make it to the Lebanese taverna.

B: Yeah, me too.

S: It's so good. And we didn't. Yeah, I didn't make it because that took too long to get there. You know we're going to go Friday night.

E: But it was a pretty tight schedule. They were under turn around and everything.

C: So much fun.

E: A lot of fun, great just the audiences are always so much fun to be around. They elevate the whole experience.

J: Oh, definitely. I mean when we do the extravaganza, I mean there's we're looking at the audience the whole time. From where I sit, there is a ton of interaction because I'm just seeing everybody's faces and their experience as we go through all the crazy things that we do on that stage.

S: Yeah, I do that sometimes too. There are segments of the show where like I'm not doing anything for a few minutes and I just look at the audience and just see what they're laughing at. Partly it's a good way to tell it what's landing, what's not landing, what's working. But they're pretty much laughing continuously at the show.

E: They definitely are. They're engaged. I rarely ever see them checking their cell phones during the show, which means we're doing something right and we're being more entertaining than the Internet at that particular moment.

S: So we have a great interview coming up later in the show with Noah Lugeons. That's Noah Lugeons. Not no ilusions. From God Awful movies and the scathing atheist, but let's get on to some news items.

News Items

Have We Achieved AGI (02:55)

• Video is AI’s new frontier – and it is so persuasive, we should all be worried 

S: Jay. Have we achieved artificial general intelligence yet?

B: Oh, boy.

E: Oh no.

J: No, well, that's that is the $1000 question. You know, the answer is no, we have not. So Open AI introduced us to SORA. You know, I think it was almost a year ago, Bob. I don't remember exactly how long ago it was, but I remember seeing video of what what this alication can generate. It's their video generation tool and it was open to the public on Monday of this week. So just a few days ago on the 9th and I think it's only available in the United States and because I had an existing account with open AI, I was able to actually get in and use the tool. So to be honest, it worked as I expected it to. It's like all the other AI tools I currently use, I use MidJourney, ChatGPT, I use 11 labs. You know there's a lot of them out there. I was impressed with what it can do right right out of the gate. Like it yes, it can create video. It can create very high quality video, but you do have to learn how to use it. But the real elephant in the room here isn't that it's a cool thing to use. The elephant in the room though, is what will the future bring us? What's it going to be like and what are the implications here? So right now, SORA is capable of creating really lifelike imagery and that imagery can be absolutely stunning. And I noticed that the lighting was super dramatic and beautiful, that it really is powerful. And some people feel like this is all positive and amazing and really cool and it opens all of us up to being able to use these tools for cool things. And I agree with that. There is a lot of potential great things that can come out of this. But that is kind of part of my concern though, right? So Google has their video generation tool, which is VO and Meta has their movie Gen. The AI tools, they're spilling out. There's so many of them out there right now and there's so many more. I mean, I wanted to do some photo editing and I found a half a dozen without even blinking an eye, 1/2 a dozen really good AI upscale apps that worked really well. I mean they're all good at different things. This is great. And yes, it does increase everybody's power to create and gives us reach that we wouldn't have had just a handful of years ago. But there is a massive negativity to this whole thing. You know, the world has shifted to a place where we're not going to be able to know what's real and what was created by someone. And it's happening right now. We've all been predicting it. It's super obvious that this was coming, but it is happening right now. The web is already filled with AI images, which as they get better and better, we're not going to be able to know which images are real and which are fake. I feel like it could be the toupee fallacy, but I do feel like I can spot them. Now that video can be created the stakes are way higher than just image generation, and skepticism and critical thinking are are going to be, I think, the primary tool that should be used in order to navigate through this stuff. Now, you think public opinion is affected today by disinformation on social media? Yeah, it's true, and there is quite a bit of it. But the future of fake content is going to explode, and it's going to make the the past recent years look like elementary school.

S: Now let me clarify something Jay. Like for the Sora videos or for other things. I mean, experts can't tell that these their AI generated, right? The digital fingerprints of their creation is still on there, correct?

J: Yeah, they watermark it. I'm sure that all three of them are. I know that a OpenAI is watermarking their stuff and and it's in a way that isn't super obvious, right. But they do have a way of of but that Steve, that's that could be easily gotten around. Once you've downloaded the video. And if we if somebody figures out what their watermark algorithm is, it would be pretty damn easy to undo it. Prepare yourself for the idea of someone scamming you by calling you as someone you know. Voice could be duplicated very easily. You know, we're going to have to change our society because we're going to have to come up with safe words as families, ways to get around this super high level attempts to hack us and to get money from us, right?

S: You should be doing that now, right?

J: Absolutely, we should do it right now. Everybody that's listening to this should really think about a family strategy maybe talk to-

S: What's our safe word?

J: Yeah, come up with a, with multiple safe words, come up with ways of doing like if somebody calls you and says I need money, you say, OK, I'll call you right back. You know, even something as simple as that. So there is a huge potential here for misuse, for scams, disinformation, extortion, abuse of content creation. I mean, the list just goes on there. When and if a news outlet that you currently trust, imagine this is how this happens. They get duped into believing that a fake video is real and they report on it like real news. That's going to be a turning point for a lot of people. That's when the light bulbs going to go on and they're going to go, damn I can't.

S: But worse than that, because sure, that could happen. But then hopefully news out like mainstream responsible news outlets are trying to vet any video before they would show and claim that it's real. And that should hopefully not be that difficult. But what's what's worse is not responsible news outlets that are basically propaganda outlets pretending to be news outlets will happily share fake videos.

C: Or government agents.

S: Well, yeah, if you have an authoritarian government, if you can control the perception of truth, you can control people significantly. And once you have like a generation that goes by where that's the case, you lose all of the cultural knowledge of being able to vet your own information or not trusting the government. The government propaganda is trust the government, and that's how people get raised. And then you have complete information control. And that's the perfect recipe for authoritarianism. That's always my biggest fear. I think like as an open democracy, assuming that we will continue to be an open democracy going forward, that these are problems and then we will have to adjust our lifestyle to it to deal with them. But we'll deal with them. But for even semi authoritarian governments, this is going to be like springtime, right? This is going to make it so much easier to control the flow of information in a society.

C: This already happened the during the entire election. There's a ton of AI generated abject bullshit that was propagated by individuals running or individuals stumping for those who are running that people bought hook, line and sinker.

J: You know, look, for example, guys Kamala Harris had she got off of not sure what plane she got off of. And they were saying like, it wasn't real with all the people that were there because it was a huge crowd there. It wasn't real because of the reflection in the airplane and all that. That was just one picture that they made a huge stink over. Think about what people can do, like the ability to make false videos. It's going to be-

C: Yeah, that's just sowing distrust.

S: But to clarify-

C: It's easier to sow trust.

S: That was real.

J: It was real.

C: Yeah, that was a real picture that they were sowing distrust about.

S: Yeah, but that's the existence of the ability to make fake images like this means that you could dismiss real pictures and videos by saying, well, that's fake, that was generated. And that sows at least enough doubt that if anybody wants to believe that plausible deniability, it's there for them.

C: Yeah. If you have a narrative that suits people and you can either create evidence or you can reject legitimate evidence for that narrative, these tools are the tools to do it. And they're being used that way already.

J: And my experience has taught me that your average person isn't going to do the things that a trained skeptic would do. They're just not going to do it. They're not going to be-

S: It's a continuum. I think there's, you know-

J: Of course, Steve. Of course. But there's a ton of people, though, that won't do anything.

S: It's one of the pillars of what we do, of skepticism. It's media savvy, right? It's scientific literacy, critical thinking, and media savvy. You need to understand how information flows through our society, how it is created, how it is vetted, et cetera. And yeah, I agree. We have to do this, but it can't just be us. This has to be woven into education, it has to be woven into information ecosystems. This is something that, as a society, we need to mature to the point where we can vet our own information.

J: But society is always way behind the curve, Steve.

S: I know.

J: Catch up is going to- That's going to be a dangerous time.

S: I think the government regulation is way behind the curve, too. They don't know how to deal with this. It's changing too fast for the infrastructure to deal with.

C: We also need to be voting in representatives who care about this stuff. You know?

S: Yeah. And are knowledgeable about it.

C: Yeah. This needs to be a platform that we support.

J: I totally agree. So there's one more thing we got to talk about, guys, because another thing happened in this whole vein here. Someone named Bahid Kazemi, who is a staff member at OpenAI, apparently this person said on X that, quote, we have already achieved AGI. And then he clarified what he said later by saying that OpenAI systems might not outperform humans in every conceivable task, but it is, and I quote, better than most humans at most tasks. That's his stance on that. There's an implication here that OpenAI views AGI as a spectrum rather than a singular thing that's going to happen, right? But it's even more interesting because, and I will reduce this down to word on the street, but I am reading about this idea that OpenAI is trying to convince the public that they achieved AGI. And the question is why? And I think it's very likely that they're doing this because of their deal with Microsoft. Their deal is that OpenAI needs to create safe AGI with this $100 million that they were given, right? And once they create it, though, then a checkmark will be checked on their contract with Microsoft. And once they do that, they will be able to go into contract with other companies and make other deals, other business deals. And a lot of people are surmising that they're pushing this AGI story, which again, I will very confidently tell you right now, it's complete nonsense. They don't have AGI, not to any operational definition that we would all agree on, right? You know, if we're saying that ChatGPT is a narrow AI that can do very specific things and it's really powerful at doing these very specific things, and a general AI is much more the way that a human brain works in a way a human thinks and interacts with the environment and everything, right? We can go into that definition for quite a while. But the idea is that AGI is and has always been this idea that is much harder to achieve and we always project that out into the future. We don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm certain we don't have it now. And it's very unlikely that we're going to have it in the short term.

S: But as you say, the definition does change over time. And at first, it's just this like ideal that is not very operationally defined. So it's like, yeah, like human-like, human-level intelligence, as we'll call that artificial general intelligence, and intelligence that is all-purpose and can think and therefore do anything potentially. You know, I read a good example, a good analogy of like two self-driving cars 20 years ago or 10 years ago talking about self-driving cars. It was this kind of vague concept of a car that can drive itself. But now that we're actually developing the technology, like, oh, actually, there's five different levels of self-driving. You know, then you could go, you could delve down and parse out the different levels of autonomy of a self-driving car, and there are these like five categories. So I think we're getting to the point where the same thing is happening with artificial intelligence, where AGI is like an all-purpose, top-down sort of understanding, thinking intelligence rather than an artificial narrow intelligence that like plays chess or is a chatbot or whatever, does this one thing. And now that we're-

J: I think the word you use that I think works best is thinking, right?

S: Yeah. Well, but if you choose to define AGI that way, the thing is, we may need to now, just like with, oh, there's five levels of self-driving cars, we may need to say, well, there's five levels of AGI, and we may have achieved one of those, which is more of a multipurpose narrow intelligence, I would say, than a real truly general-purpose intelligence. But you know, I think it's we're getting on this sort of continuum to an AGI. I don't think we're there yet. I agree, not by any reasonable definition.

C: Isn't the question like, does it do the thing we want it to do? Like you were talking about the five levels of cars, and that's all good and great, but like there are Waymo's all over LA, driving around without drivers. So like ultimately, there are self-driving cars.

S: Yeah, but those are level four or something, I think. They're not level five.

C: They may not be level five, but they're in traffic, and they're doing the thing.

J: Sure. Yeah, but again, even though they're there doing that, Cara, I agree with you. They've been trained on that city like exquisitely, but the idea is like a level five car would be able to drive on a road that it knows nothing about.

S: Yeah.

C: Which is great, but if we're splitting hairs and go, yeah, but it's not quite general AI then. It's not quite well, but it's doing the thing.

S: I think it's more like a two than a four. I don't think we're quite there yet. I would characterize it more as a multi-purpose sort of narrow AI rather than a truly general AI. It's still very brute force, bottom up, like we're training in a massive data that's really good at pattern recognition that can duplicate, regenerate those patterns, but you can't throw it curveballs. It's still brittle, which that brittleness is kind of the hallmark of a narrow AI. By brittleness, I mean like you can easily break it by throwing it a curveball, right? It's outside of its programming, outside of its training data or whatever. One of the examples that Jay and I were talking about earlier was that the art generation AIs, they are really good at regenerating art in the style of something that already exists or combining styles that already exist, but tell it to create your own unique style. They can't do that. It could only generate things from data that it has been explicitly trained on, which also to me makes it problematic to conclude that it's better than humans because, well, is it really better than humans when it can't do what it's doing without humans in the first place? It could never have generated the art that it's now trained on to generate art. It makes that conclusion problematic. That's part of the reason why I don't think we're at a general AI. You can't do that sort of thing. That's a real qualitative difference, not just an incremental difference.

B: I wanted to add one little bit of context though. That specific version of ChatGPT that was being commented on was one that has not been released yet fully. It's an unknown. Nobody in the public is using it right now. This is the one that's in general release now. I think it was 1.0, but he's referring to what the company has access to, full powered. No one has really used this except if you work at OpenAI, but still, I don't think it's AGI.

Bird Flu (18:25)

• A single gene mutation could enable H5N1 to spread between people, study finds 

S: All right. Cara, tell us about the bird flu. How long do we have before this next pandemic hits?

C: The bird flu. What a big topic. I'm going to narrow it down just a tiny bit and I'm going to focus on a subtype called H5N1, influenza A virus subtype H5N1. That is a, as I said, subtype of the influenza A virus and it causes the flu in birds. Well, there's a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. I'm going to try not to get all doom and gloom right here at the top, but I want to tell you a little bit more about what we know currently that this flu this year, 2014, and specifically I'm going to focus, sorry everyone across the globe, on United States numbers because the CDC is keeping this sort of day by day and it's very difficult to get the latest surveillance numbers across the world. H5N1 is widespread in wild birds all over the world. They are an endemic carrier and there are zoonotic outbreaks all the time. There are outbreaks in poultry and in dairy cows right now in the U.S. and there have been several recent human cases, many of which have occurred in California. I'm going to look at those numbers and this is straight from the CDC. The current public health risk is low. The CDC is watching the situation carefully and they're monitoring people with animal exposures and they do have flu surveillance systems to monitor specifically H5N1 bird flu activity in people. So there have been so far in 2024, as of their most recent update, 58 confirmed total reported human cases, 32 of them came from California alone, 10 of them came from Colorado, two from Michigan, one from Missouri, Oregon, and Texas each, and 11 from Washington. 35 of them came from cattle, 21 from poultry. Two cases, researchers still don't know where those came from. So if you notice, of those 58, these were direct spillover transmissions from a cow or a bird, or we're not sure but probably a cow or a bird, to a person. There are no human to human confirmed cases and there's a reason for that. But if we look at what's kind of just out there in the bird and cow populations, as of 2024 in the U.S., 10,718 wild birds have been detected. Now obviously the number is much higher than that. That's just how many birds have actually been tested and found to be positive for the flu. So that's 51 different jurisdictions across the U.S., 121,022,746 poultry, 49 states with outbreaks in poultry, and 774 dairy herds effective. So that's 16 states where there are outbreaks in cows. As I mentioned, a lot of those are in California. So bird flu, highly, highly transmissible from bird to bird. Bird flu is not going to go away, right? It's out there in wild bird populations. We now know that bird flu can cross over clearly into cows. And so the question is, why can we get it from these animals, but why can't we get it from each other? And that has to do with specificity of a very specific protein. So researchers, and this is the new bit, researchers published a new article on the 5th of December in Science Magazine, a single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors. So what they did is they looked at the first event that they knew of in the U.S. in 2024, where a human being caught bird flu from a dairy cow in Texas. And they dug deep into the actual pathogenesis of what was going on here. They decided to focus in on hemagglutinin. And hemagglutinin, of course, is a, of course, it's a protein, it's a glycoprotein that is found on the surface of these different flu viruses. And they help the virus like kind of cling to and infect the cell of the organism that's being infected. They decided to zero in here on the hemagglutinin. And they found that a single substitution, so they were swapping here a single glutamine to leucine mutation at residue 226. So it's named for that, GLN226LEU, glutamine to leucine at 226, was sufficient to change the specificity from overwhelmingly avian, meaning that it clings really well to avian cells, to pretty okay human. As of right now, it sort of sucks at infecting human cells. And that's why a person who has bird flu can't really give it to another person. The flu, the virus is just not that good at kind of connecting to, binding to what it needs to on a cell and entering. But it's really good at doing that to birds. So you might ask, well, how come you can catch it directly from a dairy cow? Well, if you're working with a dairy cow that has a really overwhelming infection, and a lot of virus is actually dumped into your body, that's good enough to overwhelm it. But no human to human transmission would be that intense. The viral load just wouldn't be that high. So in a human to human transmission, where we're looking at a lower viral load, the virus just can't get into the human cells very well. So we don't get sick. But a single mutation at this one site is enough, where yes, it's still better at infecting bird cells and cow cells, but it's good enough at infecting human cells that it would be likely that human to human transmission would start. They further looked at a different mutation, at a different glycoprotein there. And they found that if there were two, we're probably looking at a pandemic. So single mutation point. And this could change the game from 58 confirmed cases to hundreds, thousands, millions. Now talking about this in the context of a few things. First one is that on December 6th, the USDA said, listen, up until now, we have been on a volunteer basis offering to test milk samples from different dairy herds. And also in places where we knew that there was transmission occurring. And we've been going in and we've been looking at these dairy herds to try to contain any outbreaks. But as of December 6th, they said, okay, no more. Everyone needs to send us their milk. It's really, really important that we start looking at milk in its raw form so that we can test it for bird flu. Now do not despair, milk drinkers. Pasteurization works.

E: Thank goodness.

C: If you are buying milk in the grocery store that has been pasteurized, you're not going to be drinking active bird flu. Even if that milk in its raw form did have some H5N1, pasteurization kills the virus. It is no longer active. You will not catch it from that. The problem is there are a lot of people in this country who think it's okay to drink raw milk.

S: But Cara, RFK Jr. tells me that we should be drinking raw milk and the government is evil for suppressing our ability to drink raw milk.

C: So not only are there a lot of people right now who drink raw milk just because, soon there will be more people drinking raw milk because the head of the health and human services department is telling them it's okay. The potential will be possibly, hopefully not. There's a lot of pushback right now, which is great. But yeah, when you have people in positions of power who are saying it's okay to engage in a deeply risky behavior that, I mean, how far back, when did we discover pasteurization? How long and how much data do we have to show that it is 100% necessary to prevent disease? Did anybody read The Jungle? What year is it? So this is worrisome for a lot of reasons, right? We know that the milk gets bird flu in it. We know that a lot of dairy cows are catching this infection. And so we've got two points of potential spillover here, like a direct zoonotic spillover where a person is right in the face of a dairy cow or bird, or they're drinking the milk that they produced that hasn't been pasteurized. And right there, people are going to get sick and people are going to die. I think I read somewhere, and I'd love some confirmation of this, Steve, maybe you know based on like your writing, that certain H5N1s can have a fatality rate of like 30%. It can be pretty deadly.

S: Zoonotic spillovers are the main source of like these epidemic pandemic infections.

C: Well, they run rampant when they can then switch to person to person.

S: Yeah, once they get to person to person, it's a different ballgame.

C: Yeah, all bets are off. And we're talking a single mutation based on the research that these scientists did in the lab.

S: That's inevitable, right? I mean, a single mutation is going to happen.

C: Yeah, a single mutation. Right. And they were only focusing on one specific part. They didn't look at every possible mutation. So not only can many people become sickened now, not just farm workers, if they drink milk that has not been appropriately pasteurized. But in the future, many more people who are actually doing their due diligence and practicing, safe kind of food handling practices and public safety practices will still be at risk if that event occurs and that mutation takes place. And will we have an appropriate pandemic response? Based on all available evidence, I'm going to say probably not.

S: I would be worried. So stock up on toilet paper, everyone.

C: You heard it from the doctor.

S: Above all else.

Weekend Warrior (28:34)

• Health Benefits of the Weekend Warrior 

S: I'm going to give you some good news.

E: Oh, thank you.

S: Potentially.

C: Yeah.

E: Yes.

S: But I'm going to ask you a question. So do you think that if you get most of your exercise on the weekend, is that as good as spreading out your exercise throughout the week, like getting five days of exercise a week or cramming more than half of it into the weekend? Do you think there's a difference?

J: I think spreading it out is probably better.

C: I bet. My guess would be spreading it out is probably better, but not really perceptibly. It's probably good enough to do it on the weekends.

E: It develops a better routine, right? And less chance of missing a weekend.

C: My guess is that if so long as you're getting those minutes in, whenever you get them in, it doesn't matter. A week is fungible.

B: I don't know, man. Four or five days of being sedentary, it's hard to get to overcome that.

C: Well, but Steve just said more than half of it on the weekend. So most of it coming on the weekend. He didn't say absolutely sedentary for five days straight.

B: In that case then, if I had actually listened to that, then I think half, 50, 55, I think that should be fine.

C: I think even probably 75% is fine. So long as you're somewhat active during the week and then you're going hard on the weekends, I bet you that's good enough to be cardio protective.

E: 80%.

C: Yeah.

S: All right. So there was a study, and the study looked at a lot of people, 89,573 participants. This is a retrospective study, but they were piggybacking on the UK Biobank Prospective Cohort Study. And during that study, many of the subjects wore a Fitbit for one week, sometime between June 2013 and December 2015. And so they looked at that Fitbit data an accelerometer, to see how much activity were people getting and what was the distribution throughout the week. Then they broke the data up into three groups. So the one group were people who got less than 150 minutes of moderate or greater physical activity per week. What's moderate physical activity? Walking, doing vigorous housework like vacuuming. Basically anything other than sitting and doing nothing is moderate physical activity. So less than 150 minutes, more than 150 minutes, but with 50% or more concentrated in two days on the weekend, and greater than 150 minutes, but spread out more evenly throughout the week. And they're calling the greater than 50% on the weekend group, the weekend warriors, right? That's of course now in all of the write-ups, all of the reporting on this. So the question is, how did those three groups compare to each other? So unsurprisingly, both of the groups that had more than 150 minutes of exercise fared better than those that had less than 150 minutes of exercise. And what they were doing is they were looking at-

B: Fewer than?

S: That had fewer than 150 minutes, yeah. And what they were doing is they were looking at greater than 200 different conditions, diseases and what, like hypertension, diabetes, all kinds of obesity, including a lot of cardiovascular ones, but a lot of non-cardiovascular ones too cancer, all that stuff. So what do you guys think they found between those three groups?

C: Obviously, the people who didn't work out at all were sicker.

S: Well, less than 150, right?

C: Yeah.

E: Right.

S: So the two groups that had greater than 150 minutes per week, regardless of how it was spread out, did better than the group that had fewer than 150 minutes per week, right? In like over 200 conditions, like pretty much across the board, not in every single one, but they were improved in health outcomes from more than 200 conditions. But the effect size was greatest in the cardiovascular conditions, which makes perfect sense. But the real question was, when you compare the weekend warrior to the spread out throughout the week groups, was there any difference there? And the answer was-

C: No.

S: No difference. Absolutely, pretty much-

E: No difference.

S: No difference.

C: Because they're still getting their exercise.

S: Yes.

C: And they're resting.

S: So the thing is, when you think about it, a week is an artificial construct. It's not a biological construct, right? So that's how we break up our time and how we think about things. But going four or five days with not much activity and then doing a lot more activity over two days, and I think Cara is right, at least over that time period, it doesn't really seem to matter. The advantages, pretty much all the advantages were there, even for the weekend warrior. So to me, this is good news, right? Because it means that you don't have to obsess about your schedule and about how you just get the 150 minutes in or more during the week. And the other thing is, it doesn't have to be athletic exercise, Olympic level exercise. You don't have to be killing yourself. You should even just moderate exercise. Go for your evening walk of 30 minutes and that gets you covered. Or if you do have time on the weekend, go for a longer walk on the weekend, like on a Saturday and the weather's good, go out and walk for two hours or whatever. Get most of your weekly exercise when you have the time to do it. And again, it doesn't have to be significant, just even moderate exercise. I think what this data is telling us is that being really sedentary is very unhealthy. And that not being sedentary is healthy and you get most of the benefits pretty easily, without having... And that something is better than nothing. But what's interesting is there's a logical fallacy hiding in here, in my opinion, called the linearity bias. You guys are familiar with the linearity bias?

E: Oh, yeah.

B: Of course we are.

E: It's perfect and straight.

S: Yeah, cognitive bias, where we tend to think that systems are... We tend to make linear assumptions, right? That things progress in a linear fashion. We see this in healthcare all the time. I'm sure you encounter this a lot too, Cara, where it's the whole idea that, well, if a little is good, more is better.

C: More is better. Yeah. I see this all the time.

E: True with ice cream.

S: With no limit, really. So this is like... We see this with vitamins. If I take a good amount of vitamins, that'll improve my nutrition. If I take more vitamins, I'll even be more healthy. And if I take mega doses of vitamins, I'll be super healthy.

C: Yeah. And I see this with patients. So I work with cancer patients, which means that a lot of my patients go through things like chemo radiation, nuclear medicine surgery. And very often, I'll see different types of personality structures with patients post-surgery. And there's some patients who don't get up and walk, and they need to get up and walk. But there are other patients who are like, I'm fine. And they overdo it.

S: They overdo it.

C: Yeah. And it's like, no, all you should be doing right now is walking. Do not push yourself any harder than that, because it's no longer healthy. It's now detrimental. And I think that tracks to people I've known in my own life who are so obsessive about working out that they're actually sacrificing sleep. Well, how is that healthy?

S: So yeah. So you're right. So for a lot of things, especially like biological things, there is sort of a steep part of the curve. You know the S-curve that, well, so many things. There's a steep part of the curve where you get most of the benefit. And then it sort of levels off. You start to get diminishing returns. And in medicine, not only do you get diminishing returns, it may start to turn down again if you go to extreme lengths. Like for vitamins, right? A little bit's good. More is not necessarily better. Too much and you start to get into toxicity. You actually start to get negative effects if you do too much. Same thing with exercise.

C: Extreme athletes.

S: I see that a lot too, Cara. Like people recovering from a stroke or whatever, some neurological thing. And there are that subset of people who think, and I think this is partly just wishful thinking. They think, I'm going to like exercise the crap out of this and I'm going to get better just through sheer will and just, you know what I mean?

C: Yep. Or people who just were so high energy beforehand that they're trying to get back to baseline way too fast.

S: And they want a sense of control and I get that. And you're right. You can overexercise. You could actually injure yourself. So one thing about the weekend warrior thing, what we don't like to see is people who are sedentary for most of the time and then do extreme physical activity occasionally.

C: Oh yeah. That's how you like break things.

S: Not only that, like we talk about, I remember working in the emergency room. In the summer, we have the 50-year-old guy or 60-year-old guy who comes in because they were gardening. And in the winter, it's because they were shoveling snow. So it's basically somebody who is sedentary, not in great shape, and then they do a sudden extreme physical activity. Like shoveling snow is hard. You know?

B: Oh yeah, man. If you get wet snow, forget it.

E: It's hard.

B: It'll kill you.

E: Heart attack stuff.

S: The other thing to point out, by the way, that in this cohort, the average age was 62. So this is in older people, right? Which is great to know that even like in your 60s, just walking was great. You're on that steep part of the curb, it's the low hanging fruit. That's what you want to do. Don't feel like you have to have some ridiculous or inconvenient schedule. Don't feel like there has to be some extreme workout. Just you don't want to be at the sedentary end of that spectrum.

C: And don't sacrifice other things because-

S: Yes. Don't sacrifice sleep or-

C: Yeah. Health is not just exercise. It's interpersonal connection. It's sleep. It's well-rounded work. And I see when people become obsessive about one aspect of it and they really give up quality of life in other areas, which kind of defeats the purpose.

S: Right. I know we see that so much. People who are like, I want to have a clean diet, they actually generally end up worsening their diet.

C: Oh, yeah. Because it's way less varied.

S: Right. Right. They get restricted.

Potential Technosignature (39:36)

• [2411.18595 Potential technosignature from anomalously low deuterium/hydrogen (D/H) in planetary water depleted by nuclear fusion technology] 

S: Bob, this is an interesting one. A theoretical technosignature. Tell us about this.

B: Yeah, I always love when technosignatures are in the news. A new study recently published suggests a new paradigm for detecting extraterrestrial civilizations. Instead of detecting the conventional ET radio signals a la SETI that they might be broadcasting, or even the alien atmospheric pollution that we can look for in the atmospheres, potentially, the researchers contend that they might be found by looking at their very long-term use of fusion technology. This study was led by Dr. David C. Ketling, professor of earth and space scientists at the University of Washington. The name of the paper is Potential Technosignature from Anomalously Low Deuterium Hydrogen in Planetary Water Depleted by Nuclear Fusion Technology. That says it. I mean, but that does, that's so awesomely concise. I love it. The first argument these researchers make is that even really advanced aliens might use fusion technology as a primary source of on-planet power for not only millennia, but perhaps even over geologic timescales, millions of years. That to me, that's just like, wow, okay, yeah, here's a really cool technology. Maybe some aliens are going to use it for millions of years. I mean, it's just like, what? Millions? Alright, whatever. So these primary power sources have problems in their estimation over that much time. They say nuclear fission is not viable long-term because uranium and thorium sources will be depleted eventually, and that's reasonable. Wind tidal and geothermal sources, they say, are fine for current and near-term power generation, but they say that maintaining it beyond something like an arbitrary 1,000 terawatts of annually averaged power could not work, and that number comes up a lot in the paper. That number is 10 times what our power usage utilization is expected to be in the year 2100. Okay, you got that? So they're just extrapolating. So that's 50 times our current power usage now for some advanced civilization. Now solar power, I was waiting for them to get to this one in the paper. They said that solar power could reach 1,000 terawatts, but eventually, they say, it would cause intolerable disruption to ecosystems from the huge land use. So just as I started mentally shouting at them, they did say this quickly afterwards. They said, it is possible to generate large amounts of power using off-world solar power. Okay, that's fine. That's true. The land use, though, struck me as odd. Like, well, so what? It doesn't need to be on the land. I mean, the oceans are pretty big. I can imagine futuristic society putting solar panels over water, whatever. It doesn't matter. So then they said this, and they said that it is possible to generate large amounts of power off-world, okay, but reliably and safely transferring 1,000 terawatts or more to a planetary surface from space presents engineering challenges. So that's their problem with solar, is that even off-world, it's going to create engineering challenges. Now, I thought that was silly as well. You know, if you're hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us, and having engineering issues transferring thousands of terawatts, that's going to be a problem? But then they immediately, they get to the crux of their power argument. They say this. They say, in any case, we see no rational justification for an extraterrestrial society to stop using nuclear fusion once developed, given its exceptionally high energy density, it's small aerial footprint, and reliability as a continuous source. So that, I think, is more defensible.

S: What's interesting is we made that exact argument in our Skeptic's Guide to the Future book, that once a civilization achieves fusion, that's going to be their power source forever, basically.

B: Yeah, absolutely.

S: Until you get to like really exotic things like black holes or whatever that are not even sure if it's even feasible or plausible. But from that point, and I mean, millions of years is stretching it a bit, but I mean, but we basically said that's going to be it indefinitely, because why would you ever stop using fusion? It's so awesome.

B: Right. We do make that point. I agree with it. And for centuries, you can make reasonable projections like that, I think. Based on what we know about science, we could say that for centuries, we'll probably be really going crazy with that.

S: Definitely on a time scale of thousands, even maybe tens of thousands of years.

B: I wouldn't be shocked, but when you go to millions of years, it's just like, whoa, wait a second. That's hard to say. It just seems kind of nuts. So let's go into a little bit more detail, though. They are arguing specifically here that deuterium fusion makes a lot of sense in this context, not only because it's nuclear and therefore there's an inherent energy density to it, and it also has a small footprint as well. Think about it. Think of nuclear reactors compared to solar panel farms. I mean, yes, much smaller. But primarily, though, this is important, primarily, we've got oceans filled with deuterium or heavy hydrogen, right? Most of that water is made with regular hydrogen, and that's called protium, which is such a great word that you just don't hear very often. But one out of every 6,400 of those hydrogen atoms is a deuterium atom. That's got an extra neutron, essentially. So there's a lot of that here on Earth. There's so much water that when you say that there's one deuterium atom per 6,400 hydrogen atoms, do you know how much deuterium that is? It's so much, in fact, that deuterium fusion on Earth represents a total energy of just under 2 times 10 to the 31 joules. That's 1,000 quadrillion quadrillion joules. That's the energy that could be extracted using all the deuterium in the world's oceans, using it for fusion, for a deuterium-deuterium fusion. That is such... Think about it, that number just blew me away, 10 to the 31 joules. That is such a big number that it's actually only an order of magnitude smaller than the gravitational binding energy of the entire Earth. That means that that much energy could basically blow up every small component of the Earth out to infinity with no gravitational interaction with the pieces at all. So bottom line, there's enough deuterium around the Earth to use as fusion fodder for millions of years, a tremendous amount there. So now assuming that an advanced civilization would use deuterium fusion tech on their homeworld for so long, which is a big assumption, I know, but they would be very slowly depleting the deuterium in their water, right? Because you're using all this deuterium, over time it's going to get the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen, it's going to get smaller and smaller, and that is what these scientists say would be detectable by our technology now. In their equations, they used Earth as a model. So they calculated that a civilization using about 50 times the power we use today, that's that 1,000 terawatts I mentioned earlier. So a civilization using 50 times the power we use today would reduce their deuterium-hydrogen ratio to below what is found in interstellar space. And that's the marker right there, because if it's below the interstellar, the average in interstellar space, then something is out of whack. Something is anomalous. And that would point to a technosignature by an advanced, extremely long-lived civilization. So that's the crux of their argument right there.

C: Is it a total assumption that their deuterium concentration is the same as that on Earth?

B: Oh no, that's just their starting point. That's just their starting point, just to see, just to get a baseline. And they fully say that-

C: But yeah, but everything's built around that baseline in their model.

B: No, well, yes, but I address that specifically in just a moment here. So how long would it take for such a planet to drive their deuterium-hydrogen ratio lower than interstellar space? The Earth example that they used said that it would take 170 million years. And I just laughed out loud when I read that. So you have an advanced civilization on an Earth-like planet, and if they used deuterium fusion for 170 million years, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen would be so low that we could detect it from many, many light years away. So that's what they're saying.

C: So basically, we're never going to detect this.

B: But right, but then, what if they have far less deuterium than us? Say it's a land planet. It's not a water planet like Earth. It's a land planet. They've got 3% of the water that we have. And also, I think when they say that their estimate of 50 times our current power demands, I think that's just laughable for such a civilization. I think a more reasonable number, probably a more accurate number in my estimation, would be having power needs 10,000 times greater than ours, or even a million times. In that case, that might drive their ratio low enough for us to notice a planet like that only after a million years. Now, all right, it's a million years. That's still a tremendous amount of time. I mean, damn, I just want us to survive the next four years, let alone millions of years. So it's still a tremendous amount of time. But a million years, having the idea that a civilization could survive a million years is a lot more palatable than having one last 170 million years. So it all depends. It depends on your power usage. It depends how much deuterium are you starting with, all that stuff. So using the Earth as a baseline, that's fine. And they do say that those numbers will vary depending on the specific situation that you're trying to determine. Now, the big benefit here, can any of you think of the benefit? What's the benefit of this technology over, say, SETI or detecting extraterrestrial industrial pollution in the atmosphere?

S: It will persist for a very long time.

B: Yeah. That's the big takeaway benefit of this. If aliens somehow use super deuterium fusion on their planet for millions of years, and then say the entire civilization dies, or say that they all move to the more fashionable end of the universe, it doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter if they disappear. We could still detect their depleted deuterium-hydrogen ratio millions of years after they stopped. That's not necessarily the case, the authors argue, for SETI-like radio communications or industrial pollution for certain wouldn't stay polluted for millions of years. So it wouldn't matter. Even if they transferred to antimatter or black hole-powered power sources, it wouldn't matter because it would still, the water vapor, the hydrogen or the lack of deuterium in the water vapor in their atmosphere would be detectable using telescopes that we could use and build today. It would be detectable by us. So there you go. That's their idea. It's an interesting read. I recommend looking it up online because it's eminently readable. There's not a tremendous amount of jargon in there, so you can definitely read the intro and the conclusion. It's very easy to read. Very interesting stuff. And it's such an interesting approach to this entire topic. Like, hey, why not give it a try? Looking at a planet, you're like, oh my god, where's the deuterium? The ratio is way off. Maybe they were using some super deuterium fusion for the past million years on that planet. I don't know.

S: This is basically, this is a thought experiment, but the idea is that you could put it, you could do the experiment, like observe planets that have a water atmosphere water vapor in the atmosphere to see what their ratio is. And certainly if it all worked, it would be amazing, but...

C: It would, but right now the only exoplanets that we can observe, we already have other ways to look at their signatures that are more feasible. It just, it's so far-fetched. You know what I mean?

S: That's what I think is the weakest part of the chain of reasoning here. Bob, so you're saying over those millions of years that they're burning deuterium in their fusion reactors, they didn't figure out a way to make deuterium?

C: Exactly. They had to like mine it from the ocean water?

B: Why would you make, Steve, why would you make deuterium? Why? You've got a million years supply right in your backyard. Why the hell would you make it?

S: Well, maybe it's eventually more convenient than getting it from the ocean.

C: Why do we, Bob? Why do we make diamonds?

B: Because it's expensive. It's expensive to dig it out, and it's got many other uses than having on your finger.

C: It's not just because it's expensive, because there are geopolitical reasons, and these are supposed to be complex, intelligent societies.

B: The point is, all the fuel is right there. That's the entire point of this whole thing.

C: Yeah, but it's not, is it easy to get? Just because it's right there.

B: I think that a civilization about 10 times more advanced than us will have no trouble taking deuterium out of their ocean.

C: But that's the question.

S: They also may have no trouble just making it.

C: It might be easier to just make it.

S: Out of water. We just don't know. Right? That's a huge unknown.

B: Yeah, we don't know. That's just one of the-

C: There are so many assumptions in this thought experiment.

B: Well, in that case, then they wouldn't even use deuterium. They'd use tritium.

S: Yeah, you're right. They would.

B: That would be better. That would be better.

E: Tritium?

B: They talk about that in this paper. Tritium actually would be a little bit better, but it's got a half-life, and it's also, it depends on how much lithium you have. And there's not enough lithium, accessible lithium on the planet. So that's why deuterium is a better candidate.

E: It's abundance.

B: But whatever. I think it's a real fun thought experiment. To think that you could determine the amount of diffusion technology that they use based on what we could detect at their water is just a fun thought.

S: It's interesting. Huge long shot, but interesting.

C: Huge.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Simulation Again (53:34)

• A Scientist Theorizes We May Be Living 52 Million Lives in the Current Simulation 

S: All right, Evan, are we living in a simulation, or perhaps 52 million simulations?

E: It all depends on what you read on the internet, I suppose. On our drive from Connecticut to Washington DC this past weekend, and Cara, you are not among us. I'm sorry about that.

C: No, I was on an aeroplane.

E: I know. And I'm about to bring up Star Trek 2, so I'll apologize for that. So bear with me here. Because on the ride down, I brought up a Star Trek The Next Generation episode called The Inner Light. Do you gentlemen remember that discussion?

S: Sure.

B: Absolutely. It's often considered one of the best episodes.

E: Oh, yeah. Yeah. For those who don't know, in that particular episode, the Enterprise rendezvous with a probe. Real quick, the probe emits an energy beam at Captain Picard. Picard falls unconscious. When he awakens, he's on a strange planet, and he's assuming the life of a person. He thinks he's he, but he's actually another person. He's not changed at all. But it turns out he's someone else on this planet, and he goes on to live for 30 or 40 more years. All right. Spoiler alert. It's all in his head. He actually wakes up on the Enterprise shortly after the beam had actually hit him, and only 25 minutes of real time had passed. So in his head, Picard was able to live a simulated life on a different world for decades at the same time he only lived for 25 minutes in his real life. That's crazy science fiction, right? Great story, Bob. Great episode. And totally implausible, right?

B: Yes.

E: Right? Well, what's this headline that I'm reading? When we just got back from Washington, D.C., a scientist theorizes we may be living 52 million lives in the current simulation. This was over at Popular Mechanics. I think we're all familiar with that magazine and that website. The author's name is Caroline Delbert, and she writes about a particular chap named Melvin Vopson. Vopson works at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom as an associate professor of physics. But he also started his own physics institute, and he self-published a book in 2023 through that institute. The 2023 paper he released to coincide with that book was published in an open access mega journal called AIP Advances. Now, what he's claiming is that through his scientific observations and measurements, they support his theory, a theory that he calls the second law of infodynamics, that people can potentially live millions of lifetimes by spending each minute in a simulated life. Yep. Caroline, the author of this article, to her credit, states up front and within the first three sentences of her article, she says, he may be a good professor and even a good scientist, but this work makes errors and wild claims. Good for Caroline to point that out. She also writes that she delved into this more because of a revitalized story on the Daily Mail's Mail Online science section that appeared about a week prior to her writing the piece. And Daily Mail is a science section. There are better places to go. Let's just say that. In any case, some guru over at Daily Mail ran the math, as they say, on Volpson's theory that time dilation seems possible in a simulation. And according to that idea, it's sort of in the same ways that our dreams can feel days long but only last minutes in real life, while an entire lifetime in a simulated universe could take just one minute in the real world. And what that means is that a person could become virtually immortal by stacking up these one minute simulated lives across their entire human lifetime, leaving 52 million chained lifetimes behind. Now, 52 million minutes being roughly 99 years. So you're lucky enough to be able to live for that long.

C: I smell a cult.

E: Ah, well.

S: So I'm still not sure what the claim is, like how, what kind of simulation are we talking about?

B: How is time dilation being impacted?

E: She writes that his theory is the way that information is organized seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics, that everything in the world experiences rising entropy, right? Meaning that what the level of overall disorder is always increasing.

B: In totality, though, yes.

E: Right. And that's what directs, say, time's arrow, pushes events in our universe in a forward direction. So Vupson believes that information experiences less entropy over time rather than more. And his work supposedly can prove that. Sorry, I didn't have time to read his papers or go back and listen to everything that he's talked about on the various podcasts and other places that he's been. But he concludes that this, and she writes, he concludes that this is a way in which we could verify that the data portion of our world is being simulated and organized. So if it's breaking physical laws, he postulates it could be the smoking gun for a simulation.

C: Because he says so.

E: Right. Basically. Yeah. She calls this circular reasoning.

C: Of course.

E: Cherry picking one very specific measurement with terms he has extrapolated. She writes like a dead reckoning navigator and counting it as evidence of his theory. And it doesn't even really make sense in its own context. And she writes, think about it. Some higher intelligence that could manufacture the entire universe wouldn't be so foolish as to leave a giant footprint in the way that they handled the data load for us to find. And you know, there's a lot of talk about simulation. I know Elon Musk is a what? He's on the proponent side of there being a simulation. I believe he has spoken about it. And there are other very, what, wealthy tech oriented people out there who kind of ascribe to this as well. There's plenty of people out there of real scientific mind that basically say, this is impossible. Oh, and by the way, Vobson, and Cara, you brought it up, Vobson, basically, what is he doing? He's trying to match this to, in a way, to the Bible. Here we go. For those who say they question our assumptions, including at least one show where he went on and he talked about finding evidence for his simulation theory in the Bible. So he's trying to make this whole, I don't know, sort of metaphysical connection between it all. And I mean, when you start invoking the Bible and trying to make that retrofit your ideas and stuff, I mean, it sounds like you're reaching for something here.

C: It doesn't surprise me, right? Because I'm hearing two themes that you see over and over when it comes to religiosity and cult-like social control, which are some means to break mortality, right? Like, oh, through this, I get to live forever. That is a very appealing thing. I want that. I'm going to join this cult. And also, this idea of there being a maker, this idea of there being a greater intelligence more than us, which gives some people comfort, oh, there's somebody pulling the strings. And you see this over and over with this sort of like solipsistic. It's fundamentally, I think, kind of narcissistic to believe that there is like some thing or idea or person or being out there that so gave a shit to create all of this for us.

E: And how much does that diminish the real human experience at the same time?

C: Absolutely. Like, I don't want to be a puppet. Like that doesn't bring me comfort, but for some people it does.

E: And I suppose if you're going to, well, I mean, if you're going to cross this Rubicon or go into this threshold, sure, why not say, yeah, 54 million lifetimes instead of even just saying two or three lifetimes.

C: Because that's how his math worked.

E: What's up with his math? I'll leave you with this thought, though. There's another person out there, James Anderson, who has written a lot in recent years about the simulation basically asked all the time, are we living in a computer simulation? His blog is called Analogical Thoughts. Let me read this paragraph for you. I think he sums it up nicely. The simulation hypothesis itself is based on scientific theories and concepts derived from our experiences of the world. It's predicated, at least in part, on what we take to be empirical scientific knowledge. But if we accept the simulation hypothesis, then we acquire a defeater for all of our empirical beliefs and thus for all of our scientific beliefs. Simply put, if the simulation hypothesis is true, we can't trust the science on which the simulation hypothesis is based, in which case it would be irrational to believe the simulation hypothesis. It looks like...

C: Ah, catch 22.

E: Yep. The simulation hypothesis has a deeply self-defeating character to it. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Hard to argue with that.

C: Only an insane person would go to war.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:02:43)

S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

J: All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What is that?

S: Every parent's nightmare.

E: Every airplane passenger's nightmare.

J: Well, some dude named Visto Tutti wrote in.

E: Never heard of him.

J: He first was thinking maybe it's a plastic party trumpet, but then his true guess is it's a juvenile bird. Maybe a galah. It is not a juvenile bird. Thank you for guessing, my friend. Next one. Matthew Morrison. Hi, Jay. My daughter, Nev, thinks that it's a kitten. I think it sounds like a human child whining for cake at a birthday party.

E: Or some adults.

J: These are both two good guesses. Absolutely. Both of them good. It is not a kitten, and it is not a human child whining for cake at a birthday party. I can guarantee you of that. Dan Jackson wrote in and said, Hi, Rogues. It's my daughter's first guess at Who's That Noisy. She guessed a chicken. Her name is Celeste, and she's five from the UK. I thought that's a good guess. It is not a chicken, but I bet you there is a chicken out there making that noise right now. Listener named Jesse Babonis. Hi, I think this week's noisy is a nestling crow begging for food. Maybe a fish crow. That is incorrect. Then I have a close guest here, Benjamin Greenberg, said, Hi, Jay. This week's noisy sounds like something whimpering in the chatter of people. Makes me think maybe it's an animal at a veterinary office or a recovery center. Going to throw it out there and say an alpaca because I've heard similar sounds. You hit on a couple of things there, Benjamin, but it is not an alpaca. I have a winner from last week. This is Trina Diaz. Trina said, Hi, Skeptics. My partner and I are long-time listeners and first-time guessers. I truly believe this noise is from a cute little... Anybody? Nobody? A baby beaver. Listen again. This is a baby beaver. [plays Noisy]

B: Wow.

J: Very human sounding, huh?

C: It's very cute.

J: There was a lot more of it, but there was probably a lot more of it. Check it out. Go listen to that. They are really adorable. All right, guys. I have a new noisy for this week. Now, Steve, this is the last noisy of 2024 that everyone is going to hear. We will not be-

S: You won't reveal it.

J: -talking about this. It'll be, what, two weeks or three weeks? Three weeks until we talk about this again. I just thought I should say that just to clarify any confusion. I have a listener named Hamish Guthrie who sent in this week's noisy. Check it out. [plays Noisy] All right, there's lots of sounds in there, lots of different things going on. I will give you a hint. The hint is that listen to all the different types of sounds you're hearing and let that affect your. What would you call it?

C: Decision making.

J: Let that affect your decision making. Thank you. All right guys. So every week I tell you if if you heard something cool or you have a guess, you can e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. That is not changing, by the way, in 2025 we will not be changing that.

S: As far as you know.

J: So Steve, we have done all of our shows for 2024.

S: Yep. We're done. That's it.

J: And I am fully focused on 2025 and beyond. And I would like to say that we have a wonderful show on on its way up for May. That's a week out of May 15th of 2025. That is NOTACON. We are all very excited about it because we know all the things that are going into it, all the different stuff that's going to happen at the conference. I will be giving a formal announcement at some point in January with more of a scheduled idea of what's going to be happening. But I do believe that if you are a listener of this show and you are capable of coming, that you will have a wonderful time because I have data and that data is the 240 people that came last year. They were very, very satisfied with what what we did. And it's a lot of fun. Basically, you'll meet people, you'll have a great time. We'll make you laugh for 2 1/2 days, two in point days Cara.

C: Yep.

J: And we would just like it if you would consider coming. And I would like to tell everyone out there, have a wonderful holiday if you're celebrating anything over the next month and have a wonderful new year and let's all look towards a happy and safe future.

S: And Jay would know what's happening the week before NOTACON?

J: Yes, I do.

S: Anybody else now?

B: Think I'm getting a haircut.

E: The week before, Oh, it's 20.

S: 20. Years. It's our 20th anniversary.

E: Oh, I think we have to buy each other clocks.

J: Yeah, we're going to plan something. We're going to we're going to plan a 20th year something.

S: Yeah, so we're going to do a 20 hour live stream. Cara, you're going to have to do that from China.

J: No, we're not doing that.

C: If I'm there.

S: No, we're not doing that?

E: We're not doing that? 40 hours?

C: Thank fuck.

S: 20 minutes?

J: There is, but Steve there we did, we talked about this. There is a milestone with the number of patrons that we have if we get to 5500 patrons.

S: We do a 24 hour.

J: We will do a heavily extended-

S: We will do a 20.

C: Heavily extended. I love it.

E: Not only it will be. How many will it be? 24 hours? We're going to do it on daylight savings, switch over, so it'll be a 25th.

S: We'll do it at Antarctica.

E: Oh. What time is it there?

J: We will re enact the movie, The Thing. Scene for scene, shot for shot.

S: No, but serious, we're going to be doing some 20 year celebration in May because we have to coordinate that with NOTACON. It may have to wait until after that, just for the dust to settle on NOTACON, but we'll see sometime around then. We'll be celebrating the fact that we crossed the 20 year mark.

Emails (1:09:15)

S: Alright, we're gonna do one semi quick email. A bunch of people emailed us on this, this has to do with the saying blood is thicker than water and this came up on the show and I think and I brought up that we were talking about sayings that where their meaning gets changed over time. And there's many many references that say that the blood is thicker than water which means that basically family ties are more important than other commitments that you may have or other relationships. But that the original saying was the blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb which means the opposite. That the the blood of a covenant that alliances and whatever that you with whether it's with the church or the brotherhood of battle or whatever is more important than the water of the womb meaning your kin. But it turns out that that's probably not true. That seems to be a not to distantly invented myth. So I did independently look look this up as much as I could. Yeah, it so it turns out, I do think this is the kind of thing that requires some actual academic research. I think like just doing Google type of research is not going to be enough to definitively resolve this. But even on linguistics forums and whatever we have people who know what they're talking about debating it. It seems that the reference to the blood of the Covenant is thicker than the water of the womb only goes back to like the 1990s. Maybe it's based upon something from the late 1890s, although it's not clear if that reference is valid or not. Meaning that you're always looking for earlier incidences. But you don't know necessarily if there's a direct cultural connection between it, but there's no certainly no ancient or medieval even use of like the blood of the Covenant thing. That's recent. Either completely invented in the 90s or maybe based upon a misinterpretation of something that was written in the late to late 1800s. Whereas references to blood is thicker than water meaning what the modern meaning that blood ties are stronger than other ties. It goes back into Medieval times. It's always hard to say exactly what the first thing was. Many people give like a Scottish reference from the 1200s, but it's not clear if that you know is interpreted the exact same way. That quote says something like that the blood is not tainted by water or something, but they but in the context it does seem that in context it means that family ties are more important than other ties. So I do yeah, so it does seem that that meaning that whatever the exact verbiage is that meaning of family ties are more important does have precedence is the older interpretation. And that this sort of idea that it originally meant something that was the opposite seems to be a more recent misunderstanding that I think then just got perpetuated and again, if you just look it up you still see references to that, all over the internet. I think just because it seems like a nice story. It's like oh, this is one of those things that got reversed. So people like to say it but actually if you track it back, it's probably not real. But I would like to see a more academic treatment of this, what really is the etymology of this phrase and there might be other references that people are not aware of. All right. So thanks everybody who wrote in to alert us to that.

Interview with Noah Lugeons (1:14:07)

https://audioboom.com/channels/4829847-the-scathing-atheist

S: We are joined now by Noah Lugeons. Noah, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.

NL: Awesome to be here. Thank you.

S: So Noah, you are the producer of The Scathing Atheist and other podcasts. Why don't you tell us about all the stuff that you're doing in the social media verse?

NL: Our our first podcast was The Scathing Atheist. Started that one back in 2013, which seems old when I compare myself to anybody but you guys. We've got another show called God Awful Movies where we breakdown Christian cinema. We, we often have our mutual friend Cara as a guest on that one. We also do a D&D podcast called D&D-, a politics podcast called The Skeptocrat. And we team up with our buddies from Citation Needed to do a just general trivia podcast, I guess called Citation Needed. So we've got a, we got a lot of irons in the fire at any given time.

S: How long ago did you start the Scathing atheist?

NL: Started it in January of 2013 and it was it was you guys that inspired us to start. You were our first podcast love.

S: Oh, is that right?

J: That's awesome.

NL: It helped that you guys were like the third podcast though.

J: I know.

S: I mean, I don't know if you were the third third, but we were, yeah. We we started podcasting before podcasting really existed, before it was a thing on iTunes, iTunes didn't have a podcast in category yet. It was just an idea. The word existed, but-

NL Protocast.

S: -the infrastructure was not yet there. I mean nothing we, when we started, I mean we were like just posting it on our own website and we had no idea what we were doing. Because nobody did.

NL: Well, Yeah, right. You know, you were inventing it as you went. Yeah.

E: Yep, build the airplane as you fly it.

S: So that's basically it. So tell us about your experience with The Scathing Atheist in terms of how well it's been received and the kind of stuff that you talk about on that show.

NL: Well, yeah, so when we first started that there were a number of atheist podcasts in the podcasting universe. And by a number like back then 14, there was quite a few, but most of them were designed as outreach where atheists were trying to present themselves as non-frightening to to Christians. And that was great. I was glad that there were people out there doing it, but there really wasn't at that time much in the way of atheist talking to atheists. So we started to show to sort of to help atheist keep abreast of the important news of the day. Now this was back in the Obama administration. We couldn't imagine how important secular news would become shortly thereafter, right? But yeah, we talk a lot about what's going on in the Christian blogosphere, specifically the the sort of right wing evangelical blogosphere. That's the kind of thing that I think most people don't want to have to dig that deep into and would kind of rather somebody else look into for them. So we're providing that service to the secular community.

S: And so tell us a little about the content. You do interviews or is it mainly just a roundtable discussion?

NL: It's pre scripted comedy based stuff, so we try to keep it light and airy even though the stuff we're talking about is terrifying. We've been doing a long term thing where we're going through the Bible book by book, reenacting it for everybody 'cause that's a hard read, right? We kind of need to know what's in there. Yeah, it's a much bigger task that we realized it was going to be when we started digging in. But we're already into the Gospels though, so we're most of the way through. We've done quite a bit.

J: So you dramatizing it with audio and stuff? What does that sound like?

NL: Yeah, it is a lot of wacky sound effects. We brought in a voice actor because we needed to do more voices. But it's obviously it's a comedy thing more than anything, but it is kind of a fun way to learn what's actually in the book without actually having to read 1000 pages of it.

S: I mean, I think I've read the entire Bible at some point, but we went to a Catholic prep school and I took four years of theology, so-

B: Yeah, so did I man.

S: -doing just to get through those courses. And there's some wacky shit in there.

NL: Yeah, I thought I knew a lot about the Bible when I first, I'm not a lot, but I thought I knew like an average amount about the Bible. When we first started doing the show, we started doing a section called The Holy Babble where we read through it chapter by chapter. I'm a couple chapters in. I'm like, there's a talking donkey in this thing. Why are we talking about this?

J: Are we talking about? I know, but the thing is it, it's so absurd, but it's so generally accepted that people don't like, people aren't really bringing it up because it's why it's widely loved and worshiped. You know what I mean? Like, what are we going to do? Like we there's a million people out there to put it down, but there's 10 million people for every million people that believe it and love it.

S: More than that. It's true, but I think just what you're doing, like here's what's actually in the Bible. I mean, you could believe whatever you want about it, but here let's just not whitewash this, right? Let's not quote, unquote sanewash the Bible. There have actually been studies that show that like atheists know more about the Bible than Christians do, generally speaking.

NL: Generally speaking. Well, and it becomes incredibly important when you start looking at other comparative religion, right? Because you very often hear Christians denigrate the Quran and and say, oh the Quran is this very violent book. And it is. I've read the Quran as well, but it's not more violent than the Bible.

J: Definitely not.

NL: You know, but but of course, if you if you sort of sanewash the Bible beforehand and then you look at the Quran honestly, you're going to see a much more violent book. So yeah, I think it offers an important balance there as well.

S: Yeah, exactly. So because again, we also having been in to church many times being being confirmed as it ever sort of got exposed to the Bible through all of that. And they don't really emphasize all the crazy, interesting stuff that's in there. Like, I don't remember ever learning in church that at some point God sent a couple of bears out to kill 40 kids because they call this prophet Baldy, you know? But that's in there. That's like objectively in there. Like there's no way to interpret that any other way than God killed children for being children.

J: Yep.

E: That'll learn those kids.

NL: Yeah, no, there's a part where where God moons Moses and it's fascinating stuff. And that's really the saddest part of it, right? Because the Bible is a genuinely fascinating book, but you have to be honest about what's in there to see why.

J: I find it really interesting, like when I first found out how much the the Bible and Christianity took from other religions. You know, as far as it being unique, it's not, so much of it is borrowed and stolen. It's like a mishmash of different beliefs.

NL: Right, yeah, It's just like every other story, it's borrowing from the stories before it and those are borrowing from the stories before them, right? It's just the same motifs that show up again and again. And the Bible offered sort of the best honed version of a lot of those stories because we had this sort of natural selection they don't like to believe in regular evolution, let alone the evolution of the Bible. But natural selection within sort of the editing of the Bible has sort of honed it into this very poetic and very like beautifully written version of this again, same story that we've heard over and over.

S: How much do you get into like more of the academic end of theology, like talking about non biblical sources of information like the Gnostic gospels and the Gospel of Judah?

B: What source. What was that one?

S: The Gnostic gobbles Gospels and the the Gospel according to Judas. Have you heard about that one?

NL: Yeah, yeah. So there's a ton of really interesting stuff there. We did cover a lot of that stuff early on in our show. We actually read through the Bible and then we went through a lot of the Apocrypha and then we went through the Quran and the Book of Mormon. Because you're obviously, you guys have been podcasting long enough to know you're always looking for new sources of content. But now that we're just sort of like second go round on the Bible, we're really just sticking to the the canonized stuff.

S: Yeah, but which is great. But I again, to me when if you want to know, like again, what the origin of the Bible is, you can't just look at what has emerged as the Canon. You have to look at everything that was being written at that time. Because there are many different versions of Jesus in the other gospels that once Rome decided this is Christianity, then they actively destroyed any non Canon books that were out there and a few squeaked through. And it's just amazing how completely different they are. Like utterly and completely different. It's as if, like DC Comics destroyed every non Canon comic book out there or whatever. Once they decide that this is the story we're going to stick with and any other versions like there's no multiverse, we're just going to destroy every other version of these stories.

NL: Jesus had a talking crucifix sidekick in one of those gospels.

B: Like Freddie the Flute.

NL: Yeah, yeah.

S: Freddie the Flute. Let's talk a little bit about God awful movies. That's a fun show.

NL: Yeah, it started as a segment within the Scathing Atheist. We were doing movie reviews. This was about the time that the first God's Not Dead movie came out. In case you're not keeping up there. I think we're at 5 now, going on the 6th.

E: Still not dead.

NL: If you could believe that he's like Freddie. He keeps coming back at the end of every movie. But we used to do just movie reviews on that show became a hugely popular segment with my friend Eli Bozdik, who you guys know you had him on your show as well. He used to show up on Scathing Atheist once a month or so to do these movie reviews. He lost his job at the very opportune moment for us. So we decided to spin that off as its own show. And we thought to ourselves, well surely we'll run out of Christian movies eventually. So we just got to, I believe, episode 487 of that. And they're not slowing down on those at all. And this is another thing where I think it's actually very important, genuinely important that the secular community, that the atheist community is keeping track of what's going on in Christian cinema. What are they showing their kids? What political ideals are they infusing in their movies? And of course, nobody wants to watch these movies 'cause they're just objectively horrible. So that's another service we're providing for the community. We're going in and watching all the Kirk Cameron's newest and best Ray Comforts films.

S: What's the absolute worst one you've reviewed so far?

NL: Well, so that's a huge question. It it worse in terms of like the message behind it or worse in terms of like the actual production quality?

S: Sure.

NL: I would say the worst movie we've ever reviewed is a movie called Loving the Bad Man, about learning to forgive your your rapist. So yeah, sorry, you should have probably put a trigger warning on the beginning of that. But about how rape victims should carry the baby to term rather than get an abortion. I think that might be the the worst. Or maybe that or there was a we did a movie a long time ago called Right to Believe that was about a Christian local news reporter who is being forced to cover a gay pride parade without telling his readers how sinful gayness was. So that was that was also a really fun one.

J: No. How do you dig these movies up? Like where? What's your resource?

NL: Well, so early on we got a lot of recommendations from people who came out of the Christian faith and were subjected to these movies when they were kids, but eventually man, your YouTube algorithm and your Netflix algorithm just get ruined. It's just wrecked in there. And everything it recommends to you is another terrible movie that fortunately is great for the show.

E: Will Battlefield Earth ever be part of that lineup?

NL: We did a live show for Battlefield Earth, actually, and in Detroit, MI. We've been saving that one for a while.

S: Can I tell you something? I saw Battlefield Earth, not a horrible movie.

NL: It's a pretty horrible movie, Steve.

B: Wait a second. Wait a second here. I wait a minute. Steve, I saw it too. It's like, I don't know, five years ago now, granted my expectations were supremely low.

S: They were super low.

B: It was super low. So I was like that wasn't as horrific as I was into.

S: It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

NL: I mean, so for everybody. Listening at home that doesn't reveal who hasn't seen this movie, I want to point out that like about 80% of this movie is shot at a Dutch angle, which it's just like where that camera's like 30% off tilt try to make you-

E: Like the boat is yeah is listing to one side.

NL: Yeah, yeah, a lot of curious choices in that one. Well, I'll tell you what if you like that one, I've got a lot of great-

S: I didn't say I liked it.

B: We didn't say we liked it.

E: We'll send you the whole VHS collection.

S: It wasn't as horrible as I thought.

NL: All right. Well, yeah, I guess that's a much lower bar here, yeah.

J: I watched like about 1/2 an hour of it and it made me so uncomfortable. It like actually made me freak out a little bit. I was weirded out by it. That's how bad that movie is. So I don't know what you're talking about, Steve.

S: OK. I think it's always compared to your expectations going in.

B: Yeah, I mean, I've seen. Hey, listen to this, Jay. I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1991, and I was a little disappointed. Why? Because that movie is a classic cult. It's legendary. I watch it every year, but my expectations were so stupidly high for that movie that I was actually a little bit disappointed. Of course, on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 100th viewing, I absolutely am in love with that. One of the best movies ever. But you know how expectations can mess with your head?

J: Sure.

NL: Yeah, that same thing happened to me with Rogue One, because everybody went so crazy for that. And it's a fantastic movie. It's such a great movie, but it had been built up so big that the first time I saw it, I was.

B: Like, yeah, that's I feel bad for you because, but I could absolutely see that happening.

E: Especially in the context of all the other Star Wars movies. It's definitely one of the better Star Wars movies out there, no doubt about it.

S: So let me ask you this question then. Were there any God awful movies that you reviewed? You're like, you know what, As a movie that wasn't half bad, well, that it had some virtue to it as a film.

NL: Yeah, there's a couple of them. They slip out of my mind, so I can't really name one of them right off the bat, but there's definitely been a couple of movies that we're reviewing where we're like right before we start the record. We're like, crap, This is going to be a little trickier than usual. Listen.

E: No softballs.

NL: Normally, though, there's at least, the movies that we choose tend to at least have a few poisonous ideas that we can latch on to, right? Because I don't necessarily want to just make fun of a person trying to make a movie and fail, right? There's a lot of podcasts that do that and power to them. A lot of them are very funny, but we want to focus on movies that either send poisonous messages like be they misogynistic messages or anti LGBTQ messages or another real common one is anti psychiatric messages. They really love to jump into that. And then also we dive into pseudoscience documentaries as well. These movies that, that of course COVID gave us a rash of these, but there's a ton of them vaxxed and those types of movies, we dive into those kind of things as well. So even if the production value is high, even if the movie itself is fairly good, there's usually something poisonous enough at the heart of it for us to latch on to.

J: No, as a fellow podcaster, do you have any stories of dealing with people that listen to the show?

NL: So, OK, so honestly, yes. And I'm afraid maybe she's listening now, but we did a live show in Seattle, WA one time and at the end of the show we took questions from the audience and we've learned our lesson. We don't do that anymore.

E: Oh no.

NL: So this this girl who's sitting up front, she's like hey, I have a gift for you guys. And she handed us 3 skulls that she had painted. They weren't human, they were like animals skulls that she, upon question, she had found in the woods.

E: Quote, found in the woods.

NL: Right. She found dead things in the woods and painted them for us. And that creeped me right on out. So it was that. So do I 'cause I was holding them when I found out she found them in the woods.

S: Did you clean them up a little bit?

E: I mean, yeah.

NL: I cleaned me up a little bit. I think I may have forgotten to put those in my luggage and bring them back across the country.

S: No, when you take questions, you don't have people ask the questions live. You have them write them down and then you read them. Which means-

NL: Now you tell me it's great timing.

S: No, you can choose the good questions and you don't get people who stand up and pontificate for 20 minutes, but that's, we just did a live show. We did that method. It works really well. So for a future reference.

NL: Yeah, yeah. No, I'll keep that in mind. Actually I took a a podcasting course from you, a lesson from you many, many moons ago, Steve, when I first started the podcast, you and George Hrab did one at NECSS.

E: Oh. Yes.

S: I remember that, that was fun.

NL: I think I was like 3 months into it, and it was great and I was learning a lot of stuff. And at one point George says, hey is, does anybody here actually have a podcast? And I raised my hand and like one other person did and there's like 40 people in the room and they're like what the hell are we even doing here then, guys?

S: They were thinking of maybe starting a podcast.

NL: Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I guess. Everyone seemed to have a ton of fun and hey, 50% at least of the podcasters that were in that went on to do it for a living.

E: There you go.

NL: Well, it's pretty, pretty high.

S: It's a pretty good hit rate.

J: This is your full time gig, right?

NL: Yes, yeah, we've been doing it for a living now for, well, I guess a little over 10 years.

J: That's awesome, man.

S: That's that's actually pretty rare for podcasters.

NL: Well I honestly, you were talking earlier about how you guys had to sort of build the infrastructure as you went. I think one of the big advantages that we had is we kind of got into it right before Patreon became a thing, right before the infrastructure for podcast advertising became pretty accessible to even a smaller show. So the ability to monetize sort of came about right after we started or the ability to easily monetize, right? You guys, like I said, we're already sort of building your own infrastructure for monetization at that point, which made it a hell of a lot harder.

S: Totally. Well, first of all, we did this for many years with no monetization, right. So that was the third of our career. And then we started to do it on our own. And then the more prefab ones like Patreon and advertising came into play. But yeah, it was a nice transition, but we did this for many years before there was any monetization.

NL: Yeah, People often ask what's the secret to success in podcast. I say start in 2014.

J: Yeah. Well, I've had people over the years ask me for advice so many times. You know, my number one thing I say is you've got to come up with something. It's got to have a unique angle or perspective. You know, it could be, there's a million movie review shows out there, but you've got to have your own kind of angle of attack. And on top of that, you have to be willing to do it for a year before you even begin to judge what's going on.

NL: Yes, what what I often tell people is, that somewhere out at some point in your life, you're going to say to yourself as you're looking for podcasts, I wish there was a podcast that was X, right? That's the podcast you should make.

E: Right.

NL: There's, there's obviously a hole in the market. If you've noticed it, somebody else has too, and there's probably a reason.

E: Find those gaps.

NL: Yeah.

S: Right, right. But it's also, it's kind of like asking, oh, what what's your advice on starting a successful rock band? You know, it's like, well, I could tell you how to form a band and but being successful, there's no guarantee. I could tell you how to buy a lottery ticket, basically, but there's no way to guarantee that you're going to win.

J: But the common element, Steve, is that whether you make it or not in any of these ventures, you have to put the time in and you have to develop a skill set and you have to have a massive commitment. I mean, we did it for 10 years on raw passion. We just loved doing it, you know what I mean? And it it really takes that in order to to build it up to it, your chances of building it up slightly increase when you have that level of commitment.

S: All right. Well, Noah, thank you so much for joining us. We definitely highly recommend all of your podcasts to our listeners out there.

NL: Excellent man. Well thanks again for having me on. It has been a real pleasure.

S: So what's the easiest way for people to find you?

NL: Just find us anywhere you get podcasts, look for the scathing atheist or God awful movies and we'll get you to all the rest of them from there.

S: Sounds good. All right. Take care Noah.

J: Thanks Noah.

NL: Adios.

Science or Fiction (1:35:41)

Theme: None Item #1: A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. Item #2: Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called altermagnetism, and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times. Item #3: Paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.
Science	A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.
Science	Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called altermagnetism, and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called altermagnetism, and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to a thousand times.
Jay	A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.
Cara	Paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.
Bob	Paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate.
Steve	A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net zero carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You have 3 news items. This is the last science or fiction of the year with just regular news items. Next week's show is the show that we recorded in DC. And then we have the year end review. So just three more opportunities to affect your science or fiction record for the year. Are you guys ready for the news items? Here we go. Item number one, a new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net 0 carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. Item number two, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to 1000 times. And item number 3, Paleontologists describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15,000,000 years older than the oldest pterosaur, making it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Evan, go first.

E: The first one, existing plans to achieve worldwide net 0 carbon emissions. If they were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. The United States is large. It's very large. It is, I believe, the 4th largest country on the planet. That's a lot of area boy. And that kind of would be sad if this one in a way, I think is is science. Oh boy, tough to see.

B: What's that exactly mean? That it would use land larger than the US? Using land in what capacity?

E: For all of our solar and wind and.

J: You have to plant more trees, all that stuff.

S: If you look at like every countries plan to achieve net zero and how much land it would take to execute their plan and you add it all together, it's a land area greater than the United States.

E: Meaning it's close to implausible. Not good. Number two, the new class of magnetism alter magnetism. This sounds like something right out of the 18th or 19th century, right? And they find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to 1000 times thousandfold increase. Holy crow. That's here's one of these items where you can either increase that by a factor of 10, reduce it by a factor of 10 by 100. I don't know about this one. And the last one. Paleontologist described a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15,000,000 years older than the oldest pterosaur and this makes it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Yikes. I don't know. The United States is big. I mean, Alaska is part of the United States, and that's a huge chunk as well. You have to consider, I think, that one's fiction.

S: OK, Jay.

J: The first one about the plans to achieve net zero and it would need the landmass of the United States. I mean I think that's science. I mean, I think that taking the entire world into account, that's about how much land we would need. I would think a lot of that would be planting trees and stuff like that. But sure, I mean, I know the United States is huge, but the world is really big. That's science. The second one, scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism and it could potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to 1000 times. Oh my God, that's amazing. I mean, this seems unlikely, but I don't know. I still think that it's in the the realm of possible. Yeah, that's tough. All right. And you go about going down a third one. The paleontologists have described species. It's a flying reptile. Oh, boy. 15,000,000 years older than the oldest pterosaur. Wow. I mean, this goes against things that I've read making it the oldest known flying vertebrate. Steve, is this a recent find?

S: Yeah, of course.

J: 15,000,000 years older.

B: They've been sitting on it for 10 years.

J: I don't know.

E: Well, I had to be sure.

J: I mean-

S: These are all recent news items.

J: OK, so the first one definite, yes. The second one, the magnetism one, new class of magnetism, I don't know how profound that is. You know, maybe it's like an offshoot of other types of magnetism that we of course we understand. You know, I don't know. I just don't think that one is, that one doesn't seem that crazy to me. And this last one here now, last time Steve gave us one of these about basically dragons.

E: Oh wait, Steve believes in dragons like Joe Rogan now?

J: But the last time I said that I thought it was was science and I was wrong. I'm going to say this one is the fiction.

S: OK, Cara.

C: Class of magnetism sounds kooky, but magnets are also a little bit magical.

E: Still.

C: They are, I don't know, increase the speed of memory devices? Oh, potentially. I love all the qualifiers. That always makes things that sound fantastic.

S: Well, until you do it, you haven't done it.

C: Exactly. So I'm on the fence about that one. I agree with Jay about the landmass, Like the United States is big, but if we're talking solar panels on all these roofs and we're talking planting trees and all this stuff yeah, I think that could easily fill the landmass of the United States. They're not saying it has to all be in one place, right? It's distributed across the world. So yeah, that the pterosaur one bugs me. Those are flying reptiles and they are old and there's a whole new class of flying reptiles that are not pterosaurs or types of pterosaurs that are older. That one bothers me. I feel like I would have heard about this. So I'm going to say that's the fiction.

S: And Bob.

B: Yeah, the United States is big. But I mean, but then again, how many countries actually have plans? 4? 3? I don't know. It seems like a lot, but yeah, it adds up. And I'm sure there's a bunch of countries that have plans. The memory device, we need a new class of magnetism. That's just too awesome for me to be pessimistic about it. So I've got to just say that that's science. Yeah, the flying reptile. I don't think so. I got to put that in the class of would have heard about it. You know the what would have heard about a class. That's huge. I went went through news items today earlier. I didn't see that. That's just too good. Steve's got a wet dream here that he wants us to buy into. So I'm going to shatter that dream and say fiction.

S: All right, so you guys all agree about on the middle one, right, the magnetism one. So we'll start there. Scientists have discovered a new class of magnetism called alter magnetism and find that it can potentially increase the speed of memory devices up to 1000 times. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. This is cool.

B: It better be science, yeah.

S: So what do you what do you think it is? What do you think ultra magnetism is? Bob, have you read this one?

B: I briefly scanned it real quick and that's why, if you could, this was fiction. I was already planning driving to your house and basically flattening all of your tires. Something about this, something about the the magnetic moment and the spin.

S: Yeah. So there are different magnetic materials, magnetism is magnetism, but this is about magnetic materials. There are ferromagnets and anti ferromagnets and diamagnets diamagnetism. This is alter magnets. So this is basically materials that when a little piece, like a little magnetic moment heading in One Direction next to it, they'll be a magnetic moment in the opposite direction. So they're anti parallel, but then one each little piece of the material that has a bunch of these moments pointing in opposite directions, they are twisted a little bit relative to their neighbors. So they say it's kind of like, so an anti ferromagnet is one where each neighboring moment is in the opposite direction, right? This is like an anti ferromagnet, but also with the added twist that each that the pieces of it are rotated with respect to their neighbors. So they said the result is, it's a subtle difference, but there's a profound effect that you end up getting the best of both worlds of ferromagnets and anti ferromagnets. So the end result is that we might be able to make magnetic memory devices out of cheaper material. Like you won't have to use so many rare earths and stuff and also it could potentially be 1000 times faster than existing technology.

B: That's wicked. I hope that works.

S: Yeah, hopefully.

J: That is awesome.

S: All right, let's go back to the first one. A new analysis finds that if existing plans to achieve worldwide net 0 carbon emissions were implemented, it would use an area of land larger than the United States. Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry Evan. This is very bad news. They looked at many countries. What was it, 140 countries? And they went through all of their climate plans between now and like, 2060. So what are you going to do to get to net zero? This is what we're going to do, right? And that involves planting a lot of trees, doing a lot of carbon capture and sequestration, repurposing a lot of land. So they added it all together. So OK, if everyone does what they say they're going to do, what would be the net effect? And it would be a repurposing of land from current use equal to 990,000,000 hectare. The United States is 983,000,000 hectares. So it's greater than the area of the United States, but also it's an area equivalent to 2/3 of global cropland, which is 1500 and 61 million hectare as of 2020. Now the problem here is that we don't have have the land to do this.

C: And we're going to need more cropland.

S: Right.

C: Not less.

S: And so they're saying-

E: [inaudible] upward.

S: So a lot of the times this involves reforesting farmland. Think about the problem there, like if everyone does what they say they're going to do, we're not going to be able to grow enough crops.

E: Can't do it.

S: And also it's a lot of it is saying, well, we're going to have biofuels. It's like, OK, what land are you going to use to grow the biofuels when you're also reforesting land and also doing carbon capture and also doing other things. So they said basically this would be a disaster. It would come up, it would cause problems for our global food production. It would actually cause a decrease in biodiversity and it would be an economic disaster for many people. So this is the problem is everyone is in their little bubble coming up with plans for their little slice of the world. And unless you coordinate this all together, you know what I mean? Like you have things like, OK, well, we're not growing enough food for everybody if everyone does this. So yeah, they're basically saying we're over relying on carbon capture. We're over relying on a lot of this repurposing of land. This cannot be the approach that we take. If we, again, if we're coordinating all of our approaches across the world, we have to think more globally. You know, we have to coordinate this. But it also, I mean, I think the bigger picture here is that changing our civilization so that we're not emitting carbon is a massive undertaking and no matter how we do it, no matter how we get there, it's massive. We are shifting over transitioning entire industries, transportation, steel making, aviation, obviously energy production that we have to build a massive infrastructure. Part of the challenge is that it takes energy and therefore carbon to build the infrastructure we need to make the transition. But another part of the problem is we have we basically using all the land that there is, right? There's anything we do with land is taking it away from something else that's already happening. The people are living there, or we're growing food there, or there's already a forest there, or there's animals living there or whatever. You can't just say we're going to use this land for this new purpose now. On this scale. Anything you do to mitigate climate change is on a massive scale. This is part of the problem with saying, I think anyone simple solution in terms of transitioning to green energy, saying, oh, we're just going to build solar panels everywhere, saying, OK, where are you going to put them all? Even in the desert, you're going to be disrupting that ecosystem, which is why I think same thing with growing food. You know, we do really need to prioritize minimizing land use in our solutions, whether that's feeding the world or mitigating climate change, because-

C: Or having dual purpose or tri purpose.

S: Yeah, because, yeah, that's why any things that, especially if they like, we're going to have hydroponic food where we're going to be growing it on a very little land, but we're going to go tall. Anything that shifts to a strategy that uses less land is huge, is very beneficial so-

C: That's why I live in a small lot house. It honestly is, it's a huge reason why I chose to live the way that I live because I'm utilizing my- the square footage of my house is higher than the square footage of the land I own. Because it's built up.

S: Yeah. So, yeah, that's nice. The land is the one finite resource that we cannot make more of. So we go to Mars or whatever, but for now, we're pretty much the Earth is it. This is also why I think, and the more I've been studying this and reading opinions about it, whatever the the stronger I believe this is that there's no way. There is no way you're going to get to net 0. No way-

E: No way. Wait.

S: Without nuclear power, this is not going to happen. Nuclear has the advantage of producing the most energy per acre, you know what I mean? Per bit of land, it also has the advantage of you can plug it into existing connections to the the grid. You don't need to build new grid infrastructure. I've also been reading recently not only is the land use a huge issue, but raw material. You realize, like we don't have enough copper to make the green energy transition. Like we just don't have it.

E: That's right, copper.

S: It's not going to. It doesn't exist.

E: Maybe Alchemy can take care of that.

S: Right, I mean, we would have to open up so many probably somewhere on the world, but I mean we we the ability to to mine enough copper to feed to make all the batteries we need to make, all the wind turbines, everything. Upgrade the grid, just we don't have it. That's going to be a come a limiting factor. So solutions that don't require stressing our natural resources and using a lot of land are going to be the most valuable. And when it comes to energy production, I don't know, nuclear energy just beats everything else in those features. So anyway, I believe that more strongly, the more I read about it, the more I think that's there's just no way we're going to get to net zero without... We should be somewhere between 30 and 40% nuclear energy in terms of the the mix.

B: And similarly, we're not going to feed everybody without GMO.

S: Without going to feed everybody about GMO's, right?

C: Oh yeah, for sure.

S: Unless you want to cut down more forest, right? Which we don't want to do, which then that exacerbates the global warming end of the of the spectrum.

C: And not just GMO, but yeah, a lot of more kind of technologically oriented, yeah, approaches get rid of get.

S: Get rid of organic farming. Organic farming uses up 20% more land on average than conventional farming. And that difference is probably going to get greater because organic farming does not use the modern tools, right?

C: Like farm, farm indoors, farm and shipping containers or in enclosed spaces where the light and the water and the humidity are all controlled. And you can make any climate anywhere in the world.

S: Yeah. So this is a bigger problem than I think many people realize. And we can't just be, we've sort of been doing the like, let's just build solar panels and, but it's all good. But the phase where we could just do anything green and it's good. We're kind of coming to the end of that phase.

C: It's good, it's just not enough.

S: It's just not enough. We're getting to the phase now where we need global coordination and strategic planning.

C: And that scares the living shit out of me.

S: And that's hard to do.

E: Yeah, good luck.

C: We don't even have country coordination.

S: I know. It's hard to doing it on the level of a single country.

B: Eventually all of you will be as pessimistic as me.

C: I'm halfway there Bob

S: Are not doomists. We are not doomists. We can do it. All right...

B: Just on the side of doom.

E: Which means...

S: Which means that a pediatologist describe a species of flying reptile that is not a pterosaur and is 15 million, the oldest pterosaur. Make it the oldest no flying vertebrate is complete and utter bollocks. Fiction.

E: Cool.

B: Too good. Too good to be true.

S: I made it up.

E: I made it up too, yeah.

S: But-

E: I believe my own malarkey.

S: It is based upon a real study. Paleontologist did present a new flying reptile from the Queso Relatto locality.

E: The cheese what now?

S: In Patagonia, and it's not the oldest flying vertebrate, it's just older for that branch than we knew previously. But it is a pterosaur. Yeah. So pterosaurs are the oldest flying vertebrates. There's only so many vertebrates that fly. You have pterosaurs, birds and bats, right? And then you have insects. But pterosaurs are first. You know how far back they go, Cara?

C: 180.

S: The oldest is probably 220 million years old.

C: Oh, wow. OK.

S: Yeah, so far. But, yeah, but they really took off 180 to 200 million years ago is when they started to have adaptive radiation. And of course, that that could get pushed back if we find still older specimens. But that's currently the record holder, some around 220 million years old. All right, good job, everyone.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:54:47)

"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn."  – attributed to Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac, 1755), (description of author)

S: Evan, give us a quote.

E: "Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn."

S: Yeah, ignorance is a completely fixable state.

E: That one was written in 1755. It appeared in Poor Richard's Almanac, therefore it's attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

S: Benjamin Franklin, Pseudonym Richard Saunders.

E: That's right.

B: No way.

E: And Noah Lugeons was on tonight. What's going on with these names?

S: Yeah, I remember when I when I realized Richard Saunders. I know that name. He's not even Australian. Yeah, attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Close enough.

E: Close enough. And I did check it out at some quote check websites and they didn't say this was attributed to someone else.

S: Yeah. OK. It's not contested, but-

E: It doesn't seem to be contested.

S: Yeah, OK. Sounds good. Good enough.

E: Yep.

S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: You got it brother.

E: Thanks Steve.

S: Don't forget, listeners, to send in your votes for all the best of, worst of for 2024. We're going to record that episode next week. That'll be our Christmas week episode. The Saturday after Christmas that will come out.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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